Monthly Archives: October 2012

Red, White And Blue

Private view: Tuesday 11th November 2012 6 – 8.30pm

Red, White and Blue explores relationships, influences, and appropriations in political, pop and punk imagery. Critically positioned in the context of this Jubilee and Olympic year, the exhibition reflects upon corresponding historical moments: the 1951 Festival of Britain, the birth of punk and the Silver Jubilee. Picking up where our last show, DOME, left off Red, White and Bluelooks again at how the recently re-emerging themes of austerity, legacy, and national identity have resonated across the last half century, both in the UK and internationally.

Red, White and Blue combines film, photography, graphics and contemporary art to expand the relationship between pop and punk culture, politics and place, reflecting back upon the past as well as examining the present. Whilst ideas of Britannia and Britishness permeate this exhibition, the show includes international perspectives of place and political defiance from Sao Paulo, Sarajevo, New York, and Ljubljana.

The exhibition begins with plasma screens and video projection; a control room or nerve centre; a video immersion tank. Next, a kind of billboard alley of photographic images, pop art, graphics and posters; imagery piled high, international, and layered with histories. Anti- government protests from South America and civil war in the Balkans are depicted through posters and the moment of the Royal Jubilee of 1977 and the emergence of a Punk sensibility is evoked in black and white photographs.

At the end of this graphic walkway a TV on the floor acts as an abject sentinel, a cathode tube at the end of the tunnel. In the main space, ideas of pop, punk, politics and place are consolidated within vivid, colourful artworks. Emptied out and cleaned up abstracted details of political symbols and music related graphics find new materiality and new meanings in a contemporary context.

Curatorial concept and design: Donald Smith with Daniel Sturgis

An illustrated publication is available with foreword by Donald Smith and main text by Michael Bracewell.

High-definition imaging still has a cutting-edge ring to it, but it could bring us the solution to a mystery that’s been puzzling scholars for nearly as long as scholars have existed. With the newly developed Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) system, we can examine ancient artefacts better than ever before – which means there’s a chance at deciphering at last an engimatic script from 5000 years ago.

Proto-Elamite is the world’s oldest undeciphered script, used between 3200 and 3000 BC in what is now Iran. Although it has some similarities with Mesopotamian, 80 to 90 per cent of it isn’t understood.

“I have spent the past 10 years trying to decipher the proto-Elamite writing system and, with this new technology, I think we are finally on the point of making a breathrough,” said Jacob Dahl of the University of Oxford, a co-leader of the Cuneiform Digital Library.

Simon Patterson, ‘The Great Bear’

1992
This print replicates the iconic London Underground map in type, layout and even the steel frame as used in stations. But the station names have been replaced by the names of well known people from various spheres of activity. As the title suggests, the map has been wittily reinvented as a constellation of ‘stars’ in the galaxy of fame.

Social Language, Digital Media;

Fridays 1pm – 3pm

Tutor: Mark Ingham

Upper Casket

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“This option focuses on an area of social semiotics inherent to the codes of language formed by social processes and new and emerging media. There is the opportunity to explore the study of how we design and interpret meanings, texts and digital communications and the challenges associated with language on an evolving digital platform.”